1957–1960: early years as Satellite Records Stax Records, originally named
Satellite Records, was founded in Memphis in 1957 by
Jim Stewart, initially operating in a garage. Satellite's early releases were
country music,
rockabilly records or straight pop numbers, reflecting the tastes of Stewart (a country
fiddle player) at the time. In 1958, Stewart's sister
Estelle Axton began her financial interest in the company. Around this time, Stewart was introduced to
rhythm and blues music by staff producer
Chips Moman. In the summer of that year, Satellite released its first record by a rhythm and blues act, "Fool in Love", by the Veltones, which was soon picked up for national distribution by
Mercury Records. However, Satellite remained primarily a country and pop label for the next year or so. While promoting "Fool in Love", Stewart met with Memphis disc jockey and R&B singer
Rufus Thomas, and both parties were impressed by the other. Around the same time, and at the urging of Chips Moman, Stewart moved the company back to Memphis and into an old
movie theater, the former Capitol Theatre, at 926 East McLemore Avenue in South Memphis; Stewart recalled that he chose the building because "it was in the area close to where Rufus Thomas (WDIA Radio disk jockey) lived [alongside] several of the other musicians and writers that are still working with the studio today. They drifted in and we got locked in on the rhythm and blues field." From this point on, Stewart focused more and more on recording and promoting rhythm and blues acts. Not having really known anything about the R&B genre prior to having recorded acts such as the Veltones and Rufus & Carla, Stewart likened the situation to that of "a blind man who suddenly gained his sight." From 1961 on, virtually all of the output of Satellite Records (and its successor labels Stax and Volt) would be in the R&B/southern soul style. As part of the deal with Atlantic, Satellite agreed to continue recording Carla Thomas but allowed her recordings to be released on the Atlantic label. Her first hit, "
Gee Whiz", was originally issued as Satellite 104, but it was quickly reissued as Atlantic 2086, becoming a hit in early 1961.
1962–1964: Stax and Volt in ascendancy By 1962, the pieces were in place that allowed Stax to turn from a successful regional label into (alongside
Motown and Atlantic) a national R&B powerhouse. The store quickly became a popular hangout for local teenagers and was used to test-market potential Stax singles, as acetates of recently recorded Stax music were played to gauge customers' reactions. It also provided regular employment for many of the young hopefuls who later became part of Stax's musical family and provided cash flow in the early years while the label was struggling to establish itself. In his 2013 book
Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion, Robert Gordon highlighted the importance of Estelle Axton to the company. Often addressed as "Miz Axton" or "Lady A.", she was respected by the Stax staff and performers and was regarded as a mother figure in the company. Although she had no formal training or experience in marketing, she had an unerring instinct for music and made many valuable suggestions to the young writers and musicians. Booker T. Jones described Estelle as "an inspirer":
A&R Original
A&R director Chips Moman left the company at the end of 1961 after a royalty dispute with Stewart; he soon opened his own studio across town. Mar-Keys member
Steve Cropper replaced Moman as Stewart's assistant and A&R director. Cropper would quickly become a writer, producer and
session guitarist on scores of Stax singles.
House band In the first few years at Stax, the house band varied, although Cropper, bassist
Lewie Steinberg, drummers
Howard Grimes or Curtis Green, and horn players Floyd Newman,
Gene "Bowlegs" Miller, and Gilbert Caple were relative constants. By 1962, multi-instrumentalist
Booker T. Jones was also a regular session musician at Stax (he was primarily a pianist and organist, but he played sax on "Cause I Love You"), as was bassist
Donald "Duck" Dunn. Jones, Steinberg and Cropper were joined in mid-1962 by drummer
Al Jackson Jr. to form
Booker T. & the M.G.'s, an instrumental combo that would record numerous hit singles in their own right and served as the
de facto house band for virtually every recording made at Stax from 1962 through about 1970.
Early successes The label's biggest early star, soul singer
Otis Redding, also arrived in 1962. Redding, however, technically was not on Stax, but on its sister label Volt. In that era, many radio stations, anxious to avoid even the hint of
payola, often refused to play more than one or two new songs from any single record label at one time, so as to not appear to be offering favoritism to any particular label. To circumvent this, Stax, like many other record companies, created a number of subsidiary labels. Volt, founded in late 1961, was the label home to Otis Redding,
the Bar-Kays, and a handful of other artists. Volt releases were initially issued by Atlantic through its subsidiary
Atco Records. Other Stax subsidiaries over the years included
Enterprise (named after the
USS Enterprise from
Star Trek, of which Al Bell was a fan), Chalice (a
gospel label), Hip, Safice, Magic Touch, and Arch. Redding's first single, "These Arms of Mine", issued in October 1962, hit both the R&B and the pop charts. Though the label had enjoyed some early hits with the
Mar-Keys and Booker T. & the M.G.'s, Redding became the first Stax/Volt artist to consistently hit the charts with each release—in fact, each of Redding's 17 singles issued during his lifetime charted. (Carla Thomas also charted with some consistency, but her pre-1965 releases were on Atlantic, not Stax or Volt.) Between January 1962 and December 1964, Stax and Volt released several chart hits each by Otis Redding, Rufus Thomas, and Booker T. and the M.G.'s. However, despite dozens of other releases, only three other Stax/Volt singles charted during this time, and all just barely: William Bell's "
You Don't Miss Your Water" hit No. 95 in early 1962; the Mar-Keys' "Pop-Eye Stroll" hit No. 94 in mid-1962 (although it was a big hit in Canada, hitting No. 1 on Toronto's
CHUM Chart), and Barbara & the Browns' "Big Party" made it to No. 97 in mid-1964. Beginning in 1965, when the label formalized its distribution agreement with Atlantic, Stax/Volt artists made the charts much more frequently. Although Wexler was greatly enamoured of Stax's "organic" recording methods, some of the artists they brought in created conflict. A June 1965 session with Don Covay created bad feelings, which came to a head in early 1966, when Wilson Pickett returned to record new material. Although the session produced two hit songs—"634-5789" and "Ninety-Nine and a Half (Won't Do)"—Pickett's "corrosive" character caused havoc in the studio; the session musicians eventually walked out, and the breaking point came when Pickett followed them outside and offered them $100 each (US$ in dollars) to complete the session. As a result, the furious house band bluntly told Jim Stewart not to bring "that asshole" to the studio again. Also tired of another label capitalizing on the Stax sound, Stewart phoned Wexler soon after the Pickett session and told him that he wanted to do no more Stax productions of non-Stax artists. One Atlantic artist who was thus not able to record at Stax was the newly signed
Aretha Franklin. She instead was sent to Rick Hall's
FAME studios in Alabama, which had a sound similar to that of Stax. Pickett's subsequent hits were also recorded elsewhere, including at Fame and
American Group Productions, Chips Moman's Memphis studio. Through 1966 and 1967, Stax and its subsidiaries hit their stride, regularly scoring hits with artists such as Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Carla Thomas,
William Bell, Booker T. & the M.G.'s,
Eddie Floyd, the
Bar-Kays,
Albert King, and the Mad Lads. Stax was located in Memphis, Tennessee, which was still a segregated city, where Martin Luther King Jr., a leader of the civil rights movement, was assassinated in 1968.
1968: break with Atlantic Records In 1967, Atlantic Records was sold to
Warner Bros.-Seven Arts. The sale of Atlantic to Warner activated a "key man" clause (which Jim Stewart had insisted upon) in the distribution contract between Stax and Atlantic. This called for the renegotiation or termination of the distribution deal in the event that Stewart's nominated "key man" at Atlantic—
Jerry Wexler—either left the company or sold his stock in Atlantic. Stax initially hoped to join Atlantic in the Warner buyout, so Jim Stewart, Estelle Axton and Al Bell flew to New York hoping to negotiate a deal, but according to Stewart the figure they were offered was "an insult". Stewart then approached Warner-Seven Arts directly, but their offer was similarly unacceptable to Stax. Unhappy with either offer, Stewart then asked for the return of the Stax masters, but the executives at Warner-Seven Arts refused. It was then that he was informed that Atlantic's lawyer Paul Marshall had included a clause in the 1965 distribution contract that gave Atlantic all right, title and interest, including any rights of reproduction, in all Stax's Atlantic-distributed recordings between 1960 and 1967. Wexler expressed his resentment of the situation in his 1993 autobiography
Rhythm and the Blues: As a result of this turn of events, Stewart did not renew his distribution deal with Atlantic, and, on May 13, 1968, he instead sold Stax to
Paramount Pictures, a unit of
Gulf+Western; the sale brought it into direct co-ownership with
Dot Records, a pop label Paramount had owned since 1957. Stewart remained at the company, and former Stax marketing executive
Al Bell became the company's vice president and a co-owner, taking on a more active role as Stewart became less active in Stax's day-to-day operations. By 1970, she had sold her shares and would later go on to found Fretone Records, which had a major success in 1976 with the chart-topping "
Disco Duck". After the Atlantic distribution deal expired in May 1968, Atlantic briefly marketed Stax/Volt recordings made after the split. These recordings feature the alternate Stax/Volt logos used on the album covers on their labels, as opposed to the original Atlantic-era logos, such as the "Stax-o-Wax" logo. Stax label recordings were reissued on the Atlantic label, and Volt label material on the Atco label. Gulf+Western-owned Stax/Volt releases used new label designs, new logos (including the recognizable finger snapping logo) and new catalogue numbering systems to avoid confusion among the record distributors.
1968–1972: Stax as an independent label Although Stax had also lost their most valuable artists, they recovered quickly.
Johnnie Taylor gave Stax its first big post-Atlantic hit in 1968 with "Who's Making Love", which became the label's best-selling single to that point. Producer and songwriter
Isaac Hayes stepped into the spotlight with
Hot Buttered Soul. Originally seen just as a solo artistic project for Hayes to make up the numbers, it went on to sell over three million copies in 1969. Even
Rufus Thomas, one of the first artists signed to the label, enjoyed a popular resurgence with a string of hits in the late 1960s/early 1970s. However, Stax's record sales were down overall under Paramount, whose management were also trying to exert more control of the operation. In 1970, Stewart and Bell decided to purchase the label back, with financial help from
Deutsche Grammophon, the European record company owned at the time by the giant Grammophon-Philips Group (renamed
PolyGram in 1972). The financing on Deutsche Grammophon's end led to Stax's post-Paramount recordings being distributed outside of the United States by DG's pop label,
Polydor Records, from 1970 until Stax fell into bankruptcy. A final Booker T. and the MGs album was issued in 1971. The two remaining MGs (Duck Dunn and Al Jackson) stayed on at Stax, working as session musicians on various Stax recordings, although they also worked elsewhere. In particular, Al Jackson worked extensively with
Al Green at crosstown rival
Hi Records, co-writing a number of Green's hits between 1971 and 1975. Stax, meanwhile, subsisted on its own between 1970 and 1972, using independent distributors. By mid-1971, the Stax logo was slightly altered in which the color of the finger-snapping hand was changed from blue to brown. As co-owner, Bell undertook an ambitious program to make Stax not only a major recording company, but also a prominent force in the black community. For the first time, many of the label's acts began frequently recording at outside studios (such as
Ardent Studios in Memphis and at recording studios in
Muscle Shoals, Alabama) and working with outside producers, signaling an end of the signature Stax sound. Bell even created a comedy subsidiary label,
Partee Records, which released albums focussed on
comedy music from the likes of
Richard Pryor 1972–1975: decline and bankruptcy Despite the success of Wattstax, the future of Stax was unstable. In 1972, Bell bought out Stewart's remaining interest in the company, and established a distribution deal with
CBS Records. Without Davis at the helm, CBS very quickly lost interest in Stax. Reports came in to Stax of stores in cities such as
Chicago and
Detroit being unable to get new Stax records despite consumer demands, and the company attempted to annul its distribution deal with CBS. and was closed by order of federal bankruptcy judge William B. Leffler on January 12, 1976. Three days before the bankruptcy proceedings, Union Planters intended to produce a memorial record album for
Martin Luther King Jr. in which the proceeds would go toward allowing Stax to continue operation.
1976–1977: Stax in limbo Al Bell was arrested and indicted for
bank fraud during the Stax bankruptcy proceedings, but was acquitted of those charges in August 1976. This corporation then sold the Stax-owned master recordings, as well as the name "Stax Records", to
Fantasy Records later that same year. Effectively, that meant that Fantasy owned and controlled all Stax material recorded after May 1968 and the handful of pre-May 1968 Stax singles and albums Atlantic initially declined to distribute nationally in the 1960s (none of which were hits). Fantasy also gained control and ownership of all unreleased tracks and alternate takes of Stax recordings, including those recorded before May 1968, and gained the right to issue new recordings on Stax Records. Stax's one-time McLemore Avenue headquarters were not sold until 1981, when Union Planters deeded it to the Southside Church of God in Christ for ten dollars.
Almo/Irving Music, the music publishing partner of
A&M Records, acquired East Memphis Music, Stax's publishing arm, in 1981.
1978–1981: Stax resumes operations In October 1977, Fantasy announced it would set up a Memphis office primarily for the purposes of reviving the Stax label, with local promoter Bruce Bowles being hired as Fantasy's regional promotion and marketing manager. The next month, Fantasy appointed long-time Stax writer and producer
David Porter to head up a revived version of the Stax label, which was relaunched in January 1978. Porter signed several new acts to Stax, including
Fat Larry's Band,
Rick Dees and Sho Nuff, and re-signed mid-1970s Stax acts
Rance Allen,
Soul Children and
Shirley Brown. Porter was also responsible for overseeing compilations of previously unissued material by
Isaac Hayes,
Randy Brown, the
Bar-Kays,
Albert King and the
Emotions. This iteration of Stax released over two dozen singles, including nine that made the US R&B charts. By far the biggest hit of this era was the Bar-Kays' "Holy Ghost", a No. 9 R&B hit in 1978; it was a remixed and over-dubbed version of a track the band had recorded for Stax in 1975. Fantasy had to make do, however, without many of the well-known acts on Stax, who moved on to other labels during the bankruptcy proceedings and were enjoying a string of hits at their new homes, including the Bar-Kays (on
Mercury), Johnnie Taylor (on
Columbia, where he had the nation's first
RIAA-certified
Platinum single in "
Disco Lady"), Isaac Hayes (on Polydor), the Staple Singers, Richard Pryor (both on
Warner Bros.), the Dramatics (on
ABC), Shirley Brown (on
Arista), and the Emotions (on Columbia, and later on
ARC after their new producer
Maurice White relaunched it as a vehicle for his productions). Porter left Stax in 1979, and the label's new releases slowed to a trickle. By late 1981, Stax was strictly in the business of reissuing material recorded between 1968 through 1975 and previously unreleased archival material from the 1960s and 1970s.
1982–2003: Stax as a reissue label Through much of the 1980s and 1990s, Stax activities focused exclusively on
re-issues. Because Atlantic owned (and still owns) most of the Atlantic-era Stax master recordings released up to May 1968, the Atlantic-controlled material has been reissued by co-owned
Rhino Records or licensed to
Collectables Records. Fantasy, meanwhile, also repackaged and re-released the Stax catalogue it controlled, on the Stax label. Because Fantasy owned the non-master recordings of all Stax material, for several of its Stax compilations, Fantasy issued alternate takes of the Stax hit recordings in place of the master recordings owned by Atlantic. In 1988, Fantasy issued the various artists album
Top of the Stax, Vol. 1: Twenty Greatest Hits. This marked the first time an album was issued with both Atlantic-owned and Fantasy-owned Stax material; it was issued by arrangement with Atlantic Records. A second volume was released by Fantasy in 1991. In 1991, Atlantic issued
The Complete Stax/Volt Singles 1959–1968, a nine-disc
compact disc boxed set containing all of the Atlantic-era Stax a-sides. This release earned
Grammy Award nominations for producer
Steve Greenberg in the Best Historical Album category and for writer Rob Bowman in the Best Album Notes category. The boxed set was certified gold in 2001, the largest collection of CDs ever to have earned that certification. Fantasy followed their lead and issued volumes two and three of the
Complete Stax/Volt Soul Singles series in 1993 and 1994, respectively. Volume Two compiles the Stax/Volt singles from 1968 to 1971, while Volume Three completes the collection with the singles issued from 1972 to 1975. Volume Three earned a Best Album Notes
Grammy Award for Rob Bowman. In 2000, Fantasy issued a boxed set titled
The Stax Story, which includes pre-1968 material by arrangement with Atlantic. Fantasy tried to revive Stax's sister label Volt Records twice during this time, first in the late 1980s and again in the late 1990s.
2003–present: Stax Museum and revival of the label After a decade of neglect, the Southside Church of God in Christ tore down the original Stax studio in 1989. The formal relaunch came with the release on March 13, 2007 of
Stax 50th Anniversary Celebration, a 2-CD box set containing 50 tracks from the entire history of Stax Records. The first Concord-distributed Stax album of all-new material was a various artists CD which was released on March 27, 2007 and titled
Interpretations: Celebrating The Music of Earth, Wind & Fire. Soulive was the first artist on revived label to release an album of all-new material with
No Place Like Soul released July 10, 2007. On August 28, 2007, a 3 CD Deluxe Edition box set of the 1972 music event
Wattstax was released, simply titled "WATTSTAX". For the first time in over 30 years almost half of the 25-plus performers at that event were finally heard for the first time, released in remastered stereo. The 3-CD set still only covers about one-third of the entire Wattstax concert, which lasted 10+ hours; Concord has not issued any statement as to the possibility of preparing future releases that would cover the remaining Wattstax material. (Isaac Hayes' complete Wattstax set was released on CD in 1995.) On April 9, 2013, President
Barack Obama and First Lady
Michelle Obama hosted an event called "In Performance at the White House: Memphis Soul". Invited Stax artists included Booker T. Jones, Steve Cropper, Eddie Floyd, and Sam Moore. First Lady Obama also led a workshop called, "Soulsville, USA: The History of Memphis Soul." In 2012 as part of the label revival, Stax Records signed
Ben Harper and released his album with
Charlie Musselwhite called
Get Up! on January 29, 2013. Harper won a
Grammy Award for Best Blues Album.
Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats released their critically acclaimed self-titled debut album on August 21, 2015. The band's live performance on
The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon is credited with having boosted the band into the mainstream. In 2016, Stax issued an album of new material by one of the label's original artists, William Bell, recorded in New York City and co-produced by him and Jon Leventhal. Stax Records was inducted into National Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame on June 6, 2015 and was accepted by former Stax producer Al Bell in Clarksdale, MS. On September 22, 2017, Stax released
Soulsville U.S.A. (A Celebration of Stax), a three-CD compilation containing 60 tracks from the entire history of Stax Records. This release is an update of the
Stax 50th Anniversary Celebration two-CD compilation from 2007.
Soulsville U.S.A. contains twelve tracks not included in
Stax 50th; there are two tracks in
Stax 50th that are not included in
Soulsville U.S.A. Written In Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos, a compilation of 146 demos from Stax, won the 2023 Grammy Awards for
Liner Notes and
Best Historical Album. In 2024 Stax was the subject of an HBO documentary series
Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. tracing the label's triumphs and trials to the present day. ==Label variations==